R
Rösti
Unconfirmed Member
Today, on July 5, 2016, Nintendo published the English transcript of the Q&A session at the 76th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders held on June 29. The Japanese transcript has been up for a few days so we know already the answers, but it's good with an official translation.
Transcript in full: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/stock/meeting/160629qa/index.html
Some excerpts:
Transcript in full: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/stock/meeting/160629qa/index.html
Some excerpts:
Q 1
I find it difficult to approve Proposal No. 3. All of the candidate directors are men, and considering that women make up half of the world, I doubt such a board could fully grasp what women want and manage to broaden the market. Further, I personally do not use a computer, a cell phone or a smartphone. I wonder how your plans take into consideration the diversity of users, including such people like myself.
A 1
Tatsumi Kimishima (President):
First, regarding the fact that there are no women among the candidate directors, let me state that we choose directors who we believe can best help steer our company regardless of gender, age, or nationality. In addition, we do not intend to introduce a mandatory retirement system for our board members. Come the end of this general meeting, there will be no women directors or executive officers, and the only non-Japanese executive officer will be Reginald Fils-Aimé (president of Nintendo of America). Be that as it may, our company has many female employees in active roles, and our overseas subsidiaries have many female staff members. Our management team is keen to absorb the opinions of those employees to develop products and run the company in ways that reflect both the female viewpoint and a global viewpoint.
We want all our consumers, including our many female consumers, to enjoy our products. From that perspective, it is extremely important going forward to gather a variety of views from many different people for our product development.
As I mentioned, there are no women among the candidate directors this time, but we intend to do our utmost to foster greater participation of women for the future growth of Nintendo.
Q 4
The former President Mr. Iwata passed away last year on July 11, and Mr. Kimishima was appointed president on September 16. Can you explain why two months were needed to choose the next president?
Next, the Nintendo website has the "Iwata Asks" section, which was a very good opportunity to learn about the difficulties experienced by those in game development. I want to ask you to revive this section.
Lastly, I think many people would like to play Nintendo's action games as smart device applications. But smart devices use touch panels, which may not be suited to action games. Does Nintendo have any plans to launch a physical controller and invest in new titles of quality action games?
A 4
Kimishima:
To the first question about the two months after the former President passed away, while he was still alive, he gave Mr. Takeda, Mr. Miyamoto, and myself clear instructions to ensure that operations would proceed smoothly. While running the business based on his instructions, we took two months to carefully consider what would be the best organization to put in place, how best to take on new projects, and who would be the right person to be in charge of what.
About the "Iwata Asks" section, I do not have a background in game development, so I would not be able to give very interesting questions. Going forward, we will create opportunities to provide information in a fitting format about the background to our game development and the interesting aspects of it.
Shigeru Miyamoto (Senior Managing Director, Creative Fellow):
The former President Mr. Iwata and I had talked about how the "Iwata Asks" section had fallen into a rut, and we will consider what format will best suit this type of content.
For the last question about smart device applications, Mr. Shinya Takahashi is leading this development and I will let him explain.
Shinya Takahashi (Director, General Manager of Entertainment Planning and Development Division):
Physical controllers for smart device applications are available in the market and it is possible that we may also develop something new by ourselves. On the other hand, I believe Nintendo's way of thinking is to look at whether action games are really not impossible (without a physical controller for smart device applications) to create and how we can make it happen to create such a game. I think we will make applications, and not just action games, in consideration of what best embodies "Nintendo-like" applications, including applications for everyone from children to seniors.
Q 11
What can you tell us about your NX production plans? I've heard that labor costs in China for assembly workers have risen considerably lately. And there was news at the end of May that the Taiwanese contract manufacturing company Hon Hai was restructuring by replacing 50,000 workers with robots. Game systems have a life cycle of around five years, and the products designed five years ago both by your company and by other companies do not look like they could be easily made by robots. NX will probably come out next year, so its five-year life cycle takes us to around 2020. Production will likely be largely automated by then. Assuming that Nintendo will continue to be a fabless company that outsources production, what can you say about production trends and how will Nintendo address issues like cost and ease of manufacture?
A 11
Hirokazu Shinshi (Director, General Manager of Manufacturing Division):
Labor costs in China have certainly risen steeply over the last ten years or so. You see some uptrend in labor costs in other ASEAN nations too, so it is not as if this is happening in only China. That said, the jump in China stands out.
There is some talk that the rising labor costs in China are leading to more automation. The word "automation" brings robots to mind, but we should see the trend for automation in China in the same context as Japan's past efforts to automate its manufacturing sector. You bring up the matter of Hon Hai, but that is not about the factories that make Nintendo products. So, although I can't really comment, Hon Hai is working hard to cut its costs, and one way is to progress with automation using robots. I see this as a cycle that puts workers to use in more productive ways, rather than something leading directly to layoffs. The circumstances in China support automation in factories to boost productivity and counter rising labor costs.
But regarding the manufacture of our products in this setting, let me just note that devices like ours, which are complicated and made in amounts that vary widely from month to month, do not lend themselves to the kind of automation that is easy to introduce for devices with simple structures, that are made in constant amounts. Are there more efficient ways of determining which processes to automate and how? Can automation deal better with changes? These are the kinds of questions we continue to address. We are in close communication with our partners who manufacture our products. We are now preparing to manufacture NX and hashing out details like the extent of automation. We hope to create the optimal production environment.